Search results for " Psychophysiologic"
showing 10 items of 36 documents
Qualitative differences in the exploration of upright and upside-down faces in four-month-old infants : An eye-movement study
2006
The goal of this study was to test if apprentice readers (6-7 to 7-8 years old) and beginner readers (8-9 to 10-11 years old) perceive syllabic units in written words. The paradigm of illusory conjunctions was used because it can determine the infra-lexical units identified at the first steps of the written stimuli process. Two experiments were conducted on children from the first (6-7 years old) to the last years (10-11 years old) of the learning-to-read process. Results have shown that children perceive syllables in letter sequences as soon as the end of the first year of the learning-to-read process. The perception of these units is the result of two information sources: the syllabic pho…
Age differences in the role of the cannabinoid type 1 receptor on glutamatergic neurons in habituation and spatial memory acquisition
2015
Abstract Aims Aging is typically linked with a decline in memory performance and alterations in neural integrity. In pathological aging such as Alzheimer's disease, these effects are aggravated. Studies using cannabinoid CB1 receptor-deficient mice have shown a role of the endocannabinoid system in memory processing and neuroprotection. As the CB1 receptor is expressed in various neuronal populations, in this study, we aimed at investigating the consequences of CB1 receptor gene inactivation in cortical glutamatergic neurons in mice (Glu-CB1-KO) in regard to age-related alterations in spatial memory performance. Main methods Juvenile (5.5–7.5 weeks), adult (5.5–7 months), and old (11.5–14 m…
New determinants of olfactory habituation
2017
AbstractHabituation is a filter that optimizes the processing of information by our brain in all sensory modalities. It results in an unconscious reduced responsiveness to continuous or repetitive stimulation. In olfaction, the main question is whether habituation works the same way for any odorant or whether we habituate differently to each odorant? In particular, whether chemical, physical or perceptual cues can limit or increase habituation. To test this, the odour intensity of 32 odorants differing in physicochemical characteristics was rated by 58 participants continuously during 120s. Each odorant was delivered at a constant concentration. Results showed odorants differed significantl…
Influence of massed and distributed context preexposure on contextual fear and Egr-1 expression in the basolateral amygdala
2007
Preexposure to the conditioning context can influence the expression of context-conditioned fear. We used behavioral and early growth response gene (egr-1) assays in rats to study the effects of massed and distributed context preexposure on context-conditioned fear. The results demonstrated that massed context preexposure impaired acquisition of contextual fear, an effect here referred to as delayed shock deficit. Spaced context preexposure produced similar inhibitory effects. Significantly, the introduction of a brief change of context prior to conditioning completely reversed the deficit induced by massed, but not by distributed, context preexposure. This reversibility was inversely relat…
Long-term habituation to spatial novelty in blind cave fish (Astyanax hubbsi): role of the telencephalon and its subregions.
2000
Blind cave fish, when released into a novel environment, show a typical exploratory behavior characterized by high swim speed along walls shortly after release. This behavior wanes during prolonged exposure and thus may reflect habituation to novelty. As the hippocampus of mammals, which plays a crucial role in spatial learning, is part of the telencephalon, the possible involvement of this brain structure of fish was investigated in exploratory behavior. Ablation of the whole telencephalon or bilateral removal of dorsal parts of the hemispheres reduced activity; in contrast, unilateral lesions of one hemisphere, bilateral lesions of dorsal and dorsoventral parts, and removal of olfactory b…
Electrodermal habituation speed and visual monitoring performance.
1984
Previous research has suggested that speed of habituation of the electrodermal orienting response is related to auditory vigilance performance. The present study investigated the relationship between habituation speed, nonspecific response frequency, and detection performance in a complex visual monitoring task. Two levels of task difficulty were employed. In the visual monitoring task, correct detections declined across blocks, and fewer signals were detected in the difficult task condition. Slow habituators detected more signals than fast habituators, but NSR-frequency was not significantly related to the number of correct detections. The implications of these findings for different model…
Habituation or lack of habituation: What is really lacking in migraine?
2015
Migraine is very prevalent disease with consistent disability and socioeconomic burden (Lipton et al., 2007). Despite intensive research effort, particularly in last decades, allowing significant insight in many aspects of the disease, its precise pathophysiological bases remain still to be defined. One influential view suggests that dysfunctions in sensory information processing could play a critical role (de Tommaso et al., 2014). In this frame a relevant phenomenological marker is considered the inability of migraine patients to habituate to repeated sensory stimulation.
Spatial cues are relevant for learned preference/aversion shifts due to amino-acid deficiencies.
1998
Rats are able to choose appropriately between two versions of a novel diet, when one is amino-acid devoid and the other corrected. Recognition of the deficiency has been reported to occur within hours and to initiate a strong conditioned aversion. For that purpose the rat can use either oro-sensory cues or another alternative as the conditioned stimulus (CS) with which to associate the unconditioned stimuli (US) of either the adequate diet or the devoid diet. The present investigation was designed to determine whether rats have the ability to use place as a cue in amino-acid preference/aversion. In order to avoid interfering with any other than spatial sensory discrimination between the dev…
Cortical inhibition and habituation to evoked potentials: relevance for pathophysiology of migraine
2009
Dysfunction of neuronal cortical excitability has been supposed to play an important role in etiopathogenesis of migraine. Neurophysiological techniques like evoked potentials (EP) and in the last years non-invasive brain stimulation techniques like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation gave important contribution to understanding of such issue highlighting possible mechanisms of cortical dysfunctions in migraine. EP studies showed impaired habituation to repeated sensorial stimulation and this abnormality was confirmed across all sensorial modalities, making defective habituation a neurophysiological hallmark of the disease. TMS was employed to…
Role of the vomeronasal system in intersexual attraction in female mice
2008
Although it is generally accepted that rodents' sociosexual behavior relies mainly on chemosignals, the specific roles played by the vomeronasal and olfactory systems in detecting these signals are presently unclear. This work reports the results of three experiments aimed at clarifying the role of the vomeronasal system on gender recognition and intersexual attraction, by analyzing the effects of lesions of the accessory olfactory bulbs (AOB) in chemically naive female mice. The first experiment demonstrates that lesions of the AOB abolish the preference that females show for male-soiled bedding in tests in which the females can contact the bedding, thus having access to both volatile and …